Books by Kate Chopin

The Awakening (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Kate Chopin

When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the straitened confines of her domestic situation.
Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work "quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment of infidelity."
Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception, artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening. Now available in this inexpensive edition, it offers a powerful and provocative reading experience to modern readers.

The Awakening and Selected Short Stories (Bantam Classics)

by Kate Chopin

First published in 1899, this beautiful, brief novel so disturbed critics and the public that it was banished for decades afterward. Now widely read and admired, The Awakening has been hailed as an early vision of woman's emancipation. This sensuous book tells of a woman's abandonment of her family, her seduction, and her awakening to desires and passions that threated to consumer her. Originally entitled "A Solitary Soul," this portrait of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier is a landmark in American fiction, rooted firmly in the romantic tradition of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Here, a woman in search of self-discovery turns away from convention and society, and toward the primal, from convention and society, and toward the primal, irresistibly attracted to nature and the sensesThe Awakening, Kate Chopin's last novel, has been praised by Edmund Wilson as "beautifully written." And Willa Cather described its style as "exquisite," "sensitive," and "iridescent." This edition of The Awakening also includes a selection of short stories by Kate Chopin.

"This seems to me a higher order of feminism than repeating the story of woman as victim... Kate Chopin gives her female protagonist the central role, normally reserved for Man, in a meditation on identity and culture, consciousness and art." -- From the introduction by Marilynne Robinson.

The Awakening: A Novel (Modern Library Torchbearers)

by Kate Chopin

A new edition of Kate Chopin’s controversial masterpiece, an essential novel in the canon of early feminism—with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties.

“Whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.”

With its forthright treatment of sex and depression, The Awakening, first published in 1899,was so shocking to turn-of-the-century readers that it was neglected for decades. Rediscovered in the 1960s, this brief, beautiful novel is considered a landmark of early feminism. It is the story of Edna Pontellier, a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother of two who—with devastating consequences—rejects her conventional married life for a transgressive path of self-discovery.

Edna is vacationing with her husband and children on the Louisiana Gulf Coast when she meets and falls in love with the passionate, impulsive Robert Lebrun. Afterward, Edna can no longer find meaning and satisfaction in her comfortable domestic life and moves out, alone. Her tragic quest for personal, creative, and erotic freedom is at the heart of this now-classic novel which captures women’s desires with extraordinary frankness, sympathy, and intensity.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

The Awakening and Selected Stories (The Penguin American Library)

by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin's groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire

When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her death, it is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement. Through careful, subtle changes of style, Chopin shows the transformation of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother, who - with tragic consequences - refuses to be caged by married and domestic life, and claims for herself moral and erotic freedom.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Bayou Folk and a Night in Acadie (Penguin Classics)

by Kate Chopin

In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Awakening and Selected Stories (Penguin Vitae)

by Kate Chopin

The groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire, with an insightful introduction by author Claire Vaye Watkins.

A Penguin Vitae Edition

When Kate Chopin's classic was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her death, The Awakening is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement and a celebrated work of early feminist literature. Through careful, subtle changes of style, Chopin shows the transformation of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother, who - with tragic consequences - refuses to be caged by married and domestic life, and claims for herself moral and erotic freedom.

Penguin Classics launches a new hardcover series with five American classics that are relevant and timeless in their power, and part of a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from almost seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

The Awakening: And Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

by Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. This selection, freshly edited from the first printing of each text, enables readers to follow her unfolding career as she experimented with a broad range of writing, from tales for children to decadent fin-de siecle sketches. The Awakening is set alongside thirty-two short stories, illustrating the spectrum of the fiction from her first published stories to her 1898 secret masterpiece, "The Storm."

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (Signet Classics)

by Kate Chopin

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life.”

Kate Chopin was enjoying wide popularity as a writer, mainly of short stories, when her second novel, The Awakening, was published to widespread criticism of its immorality. A wake-up call to women all over the country, this landmark novel of early American feminism tells of a Louisiana wife who discovers the strength of her own sexuality and tries to wrench it from the hands of a patriarchal society. And just as Edna Pontellier is ostracized for trying to master her own sexual fate, so did Chopin’s reputation suffer after she wrote this book. Today The Awakening is considered a masterpiece and, along with Chopin’s short stories, has set a standard for younger generations of women who have learned to value their independence and authenticity.

Edited and with an Introduction by Barbara H. Solomon

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin, Kelley Armstrong

If you had met me a few weeks ago, you probably would have described me as an average teenage girl—someone normal. Now my life has changed forever and I'm as far away from normal as it gets. A living science experiment—not only can I see ghosts, but I was genetically altered by a sinister organization called the Edison Group. What does that mean? For starters, I'm a teenage necromancer whose powers are out of control; I raise the dead without even trying. Trust me, that is not a power you want to have. Ever.
Now I'm running for my life with three of my supernatural friends—a charming sorcerer, a cynical werewolf, and a disgruntled witch—and we have to find someone who can help us before the Edison Group finds us first. Or die trying.

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin, Kelley Armstrong

"She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before."

The Awakening and Selected Stories (Vintage Classics)

by Kate Chopin

A feminist literary landmark: the daring story of a woman's search for personal freedom that was so controversial in 1899 that it ended its author's career.

With an effortless, sure-handed artistry, Kate Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young mother and model wife, whose romantic involvement with a young man at a seaside resort allows her for the first time to imagine a freer life. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna leaves her husband’s home for her own cottage, pursues her artistic ambitions, and begins an affair, only to discover that the constraints of social custom are more powerful than she had thought. Contemporary readers were shocked by the frank, unapologetic treatment of adultery in The Awakening, but over the ensuing century the novel went on to achieve the status of a classic for its visionary prescience and narrative brilliance.

The Awakening and Selected Stories (Modern Library Classics)

by Kate Chopin

Introduction by Kaye Gibbons
Edited and with notes by Nina Baym
Commentary by Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book

The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of sex and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine’s desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner whom she meets on vacation. The power of sensuality, the delusion of ecstatic love, and the solitude that accompanies the trappings of middle- and upper-class life are the themes of this now-classic novel. As Kaye Gibbons points out in her Introduction, Chopin “was writing American realism before most Americans could bear to hear that they were living it.” This edition includes selected stories from Chopin’s Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie.

Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide

The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (Enriched Classics)

by Kate Chopin

Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.

When The Awakening was first published in 1899, critical outcry proved so vociferous that the novel was banned for decades. Now praised as a classic of early feminist literature, Kate Chopin’s final work rejects conventional female roles and celebrates a woman’s journey towards self-awareness. As the heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens to her own desires, she begins to question her ideas about marriage, motherhood, society, art, and the nature of love itself. A milestone in American fiction, The Awakening is an unforgettably poignant novel of self-discovery that has inspired generations of readers.

Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author’s personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research.

Read with confidence.

The Awakening: and Other Stories (Macmillian Collector's Library)

by Kate Chopin

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Edna Pontellier is on holiday with her husband and children at Grand Isle, on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There, she is pursued by and falls in love with the passionate and earnest, Robert Lebrun. But Robert, convinced that their relationship is doomed, flees to Mexico. On her return to New Orleans, Edna, overwhelmed by her desire for freedom, moves out of the family home to her own rented property. Robert eventually returns to declare his love for Edna only to abandon her again with tragic consequences.

Kate Chopin’s famous novella is recognised as a landmark work of early feminist fiction and is published in this volume with a selection of her short stories.

Edited and introduced by Dr J. Michelle Coghlan.

Nine Stories (Counterpoints)

by Kate Chopin

A carefully curated selection of stories from "one of the foremothers of 20th-century literature and feminist thought" (The New York Times), known for her deep emotional acuity and nuanced depictions of women

Today, Kate Chopin is widely considered a pioneering and influential feminist voice in American letters. Her fiction, though not embraced in her day, has endured into our own, and grapples with fundamental questions of marriage, sexuality, race, and the role of women in a modern society. The nine stories collected here elaborate on Chopin’s timeless themes while evoking the rich Louisiana setting so often featured in her work.

The Awakening (The Art of the Novella)

by Kate Chopin

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

Condemned as "sordid" and "immoral" on its publication in 1899, this story of a woman trapped in her marriage effectively ended Chopin's career but was revived as a proto-feminist classic in the 1970s. What Newsweek calls Chopin's "prophetic psychology" ensures its timeliness today.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

The Awakening An Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts, Criticism

by Kate Chopin

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

- The annotated text of Kate Chopin's modernist novel of marital infidelity, set in New Orleans and Grande Isle, Louisiana.
- A preface, a critical essay, and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley.
- Essays by acclaimed Chopin biographers Per Seyersted and Emily Toth, "An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler" with selections from the conduct books of the period, and contemporary perspectives on womanhood, motherhood, and marriage.
- Forty-five reviews and interpretive essays on The Awakening spanning three centuries.
- A Chronology of Chopin's life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography.

The Awakening An Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts, Criticism

by Kate Chopin

The text is that of the first edition of the novel, published by Herbert S. Stone in 1899. It has been annotated by the editor and includes translations of French phrases and information about New Orleans locales, customs, and lore, the Bayou region, and Creole culture. "Bibliographical and Historical Contexts", expanded and introduced by a new Editor's Note, presents biographical, historical, and cultural documents contemporary with the novel's publication. Included are a biographical essay by the acclaimed Chopin biographer Emily Toth, "An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler" with selections from the conduct books of the period in which Chopin lived and wrote, and period fashion plates from Harper's Bazar. A comprehensive "Criticism" section, introduced by a new Editor's Note, contains expanded selections from hard-to-find contemporary reviews of the novel; two letters of mysterious origin written in response to the novel; and Chopin's "Retraction," which followed The Awakening's negative reception. These are followed by twenty-seven interpretive essays, twelve of them new to the Second Edition, that provide a variety of perspectives on The Awakening, including essays by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Nancy Walker, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Paula A. Treichler, Sandra M. Gilbert, Lee R. Edwards, Patricia S. Yaeger, Elizabeth Ammons, and Elaine Showalter. A Chronology of Chopin's life and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

A Vocation and a Voice: Stories (Penguin Classics)

by Kate Chopin

Published for the first time as Chopin intended, this is a collection of her most innovative stories, including "The Story of an Hour," "An Egyptian Cigarette," and "The Kiss."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories: At Fault / Bayou Folk / A Night in Acadie / The Awakening / Uncollected Stories (Library of America)

by Kate Chopin

From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin’s novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume.

The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man’s alcoholic wife. In the two story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the popular local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales that portray Louisiana bayou cultures with sympathetic insight and an eye to the unresolved conflicts of a South reeling from the Civil War.

In The Awakening (1899), the novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her public career as a writer, Chopin tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment. Rendered with masterful precision, detachment, and a suggestive ambiguity that defies easy judgments about Edna’s actions, The Awakening is the novel that restored Chopin to literary prominence after its rediscovery by critics in the 1960s and 1970s.

The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for A Vocation and a Voice, a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900; stories that Chopin never tried to publish, such as the erotically daring “The Storm”; and “Ti Frère,” “A Horse Story,” and “Alexandre’s Wonderful Experience,” three stories which were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin’s papers.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Lilacs and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Kate Chopin

Before she wrote The Awakening — a powerful novel that has illuminated generations of readers with its strikingly honest and controversial themes of female sexuality and miscegenation--Kate Chopin penned many well-received short stories of Creole and Acadian life. Infused with "local color," these tales are filled with fascinating characters, idiosyncratic customs, and sometimes shocking details.
Reflecting the influences of the French writers Guy de Maupassant and George Sand, "Lilacs" is a heartfelt and simple tale of love, life, and devotion. The compelling work is accompanied by 23 other distinctive tales of southern life, among them "A No-Account Creole" and "Love on the Bon-Dieu," from Bayou Folk, and "A Matter of Prejudice," "The Lilies," and "Dead Men's Shoes" from A Night in Acadie.

The Story of an Hour

by Kate Chopin

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name

Nuns, maidens, adventurers - with electricity, The Story of an Hour brings together stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what will emancipation feel like for women, looking at the horizon and the future, to the frontier?